the very writing of this post in all lowercase letters is my small act of rebellion for today leading into this brief moment we are going to share. i hope you can take something from tonight’s rambling.
ever since my controversial post regarding my moment of compassion towards the boston bombing suspect, i haven’t been able to stop thinking about the experience. the moment stays etched in my consciousness as a reminder to “love thy enemy as thyself”, as jesus so simply put it. the trick here is not to “try” and see yourself in others, but to be open enough to who you are and another that you see at their core and your own, a common humanity: the “good” and the “bad”.
listen, i’m a recovering optimistaholic…yes i just made that up. make it rebellion number two tonight; number three if you count having compassion for terrorists to be socially unacceptable. in other words, at one point in time i was mostly interested in seeing the happy side of life, the good in people and all the positive, lovely things disney movies are made of (even though a parent always dies in those movies, so clearly i suffered from my condition early on). i even naively believed that with enough light, darkness will disappear. dissipate. vanish. gone. then i had an awakening, “i learned something today” (random south park quote, man i am squirrelly tonight):
the point isn’t to get rid of the darkness, but to acknowledge it, understand it and learn how to channel it in a way that propels our understanding of ourselves and the world around us forward. what we may consider darkness, bad or evil, is necessary to existence. without it there is no balance, there is no contrast. there is no light to be seen or known without the darkness. we are powerful beings with all potentials along the spectrum of human awareness, choice and action within us. to be perfectly honest, i’ve had an incredibly profound experience looking at my own darkness and trying to understand it. there is tremendous power in this awareness.
for me, the journey inward and the willingness to look at my own personal uglies was and still is a more arduous, but far more enlightening process than just patting myself on the back for the parts of my personality i consider “positive”. at the end of the day, whether i am willing to accept my individual shades of “darkness” or not, doesn’t mean they cease to exist. to steal a term from my acting coach, knowingly sweeping my ugly under the rug would make me “consciously oblivious”, which is just a nice way of saying someone is “fully aware they are in denial”. to me, opening up to this self-discovery is a step towards self-mastery.
looking at the natural dichotomy that exists in our world, it is no less consciously oblivious to deny the positive human traits that exist in people who do what we call “bad” things in the world, than it is for a goody two-shoes like me to deny the negative human traits that shade my personality. again, this to me is a step towards full awareness of my own human condition. this process not only elevates personal awareness, but expands consciousness further outward into the world. i must find and accept the variegation of humanity in myself, before i may see it in others.
so what did jesus mean when he told everyone to love thy enemy as thyself? not that you and i should love our enemies because it gets us into heaven, because it is an act of forgiveness or because he said so. jesus was guiding us so we may awaken enough to see our shared humanity. when we see this, we will love our enemies as ourselves because we acknowledge we are at the core the same person, in varied form. at last, we will realize we are not separate, but we are all one. this is THE human truth.
- jmb
